From Netease:
Recently, Internet popular figure Luo Yonghao (罗永浩: English teacher, China Internet celebrity, Luo animation studio, Yan tribe, and Lao Luo English language training and Bullog.cn founder, formerly the Beijing New Oriental School English teacher, lectures with humorous style, his speeches spread on the Internet by his students, known as “Lao Luo’s quotations.” Therefore his influence rapidly expanses among students) wrote in his micro-blog, the Siemens refrigerator and washing machine he bought three years ago were all broken. Especially, the Siemens refrigerator door does not shut tightly. Therefore Luo filed several complaints to Siemens customer service. The result was Siemens refused to admit there are any issues with the products.
Under Luo’s “promotion”, Siemens “refrigerator gate” incident was elevated again by the majority of consumers and the media attention. Many netizens’ reactions on the Internet said Siemens refrigerator door indeed does not shut tight.
In mid-October, Siemens changed their “refusing to admit” attitude and issued a statement promising free on-site service with the refrigerator door shutting problem. If you ever encounter such problem call the Siemens appliances national customer service hotline 4008899999 and they will provide consumers with free on-site service.
Luo Yonghao said in his micro-blog, Siemens refrigerator has the problem of “door not shutting tightly”, but Siemens has been avoiding the issue. Therefore, Luo Yonghao convened some of the victims to go to the Siemens headquarters in Beijing, and angrily smashed three problem refrigerators on the spot. However, no one from Siemens responded to the incident.
November 20, Luo Yonghao, and other volunteers came to demonstrate at the Siemens headquarters in Beijing. They smashed three problem refrigerators and submitted a written request to urge Siemens to give recognition of product issues, to stop shirk responsibility, to stop ignoring the demands of consumers and also recall the problem refrigerators.
Finally, Siemens called the police and the show was finally over. Luo Yonghao continued posting on his micro-blog saying if Siemens keep avoiding this issue, he will convene more victims to smash refrigerators again.
Luo responded to one netizen’s remark on his action on Weibo
@无猫的野比:
I look forward to you having the ability to take on government departments or state-owned enterprises or even big private companies…
Luo:
Reply to @ 猫的野比: We all do what we supposed be doing, no one is competing on who is crazier, according to your mentally challenged thinking, if you are ‘crazy’ then go complain to Hu Jintao with your real name. Do not use turtle shell like "野比" (name used on Weibo) say sarcastic words to someone who tries to protect rights of consumers.
27 comments
Why aren’t they protesting against the CCP instead of an innocent German company? The CCP are killing billions of people yet all they care about is refridgerators?
Chinese people shouldn’t be allowed to protest because they never protest anything worthwhile. They shouldn’t be protesting against the west, they should be protesting against their government or other Asians.
Come on, I wanna see some bloodshed.
Censor that Chinahush! You’re no better than the CCP.
There needs to be another Tian’men square before China wakes up!
The CCP is to blame for my low income and small welfare checks, let’s protest them for more money and better living conditions in the west.
CCP is not easy to against as you could think. But it does not mean we have to give up to fight for our rights. Chinese need to voice themselves and fight for their every fundamental right. From the basic consumer rights, everyone needs to gradually know the significant of voice out and act out. Also, united are much powerful.
The German Company could be innocent, but people working in consumer’s services or the principles of company may not be innocent.
To whoever translated this article: “To say words” is not a valid collocation in English. “Say sarcastic words to someone” is therefore not correct. In English, you express this by saying that you “are sarcastic with someone.” A more correct translation of the relevant sentence in the second comment would be “don’t hide behind names like ‘yebi’ when you are sarcastic with someone who is trying to protect the rights of the consumers.’
“To say words” and “to speak words” are common Chinglish mistranslations. Please do not use them.
You’ve got a big set of balls, criticizing the person providing free translation services who didn’t even make a grammatical mistake, but rather, a misapplication of a collocation.
Particularly when I’m sure you meant to say “to whomever translated this article”.
As we Chinglish lovers say: Sweep your own doorstep first.
“Whoever” is a perfectly valid object construction in modern colloquial English. You would know that, if you had paid attention to the development of modern standard English since the 1800s.
I also do not see the problem with pointing out mistranslations. I myself am offering free advise, and no one is forced to take it seriously.
Let me point out my own typo before a pedant comes by: “Advice”
As “shh” clearly is not knowledgeable about developments in modern English, I will even provide a peer-reviewed reference to my claim that “whomever” has fallen out of common use and “whoever” is a valid dative object:
Lasnik, Howard; Nicholas Sobin (2000). “The who/whom puzzle: On the preservation of an archaic feature”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18 (2): 343–371
This guy is an idiot. What he did served no purpose whatsoever and couldn’t have been more futile and redundant. Stupid ugly pig.
Yeah just like the Amerikans that used to smashed cars to protest made in Japan junk cars.
All English teachers in China are crazy?
One hits his wife, another – refrigerators…
Too bad they are not like American and Canadian teachers that likes to rape their students.
Dhina people are so dumb and can’t to do better to fuck up the world.
Oops that s/b Chinese people and not Dhina people are so dumb and they can’t to do better to fuck up the world like the Americans.
Make war and free the people from the good earth.
Didn’t bullog.cn get taken down or something
I haven’t heard about this guy in ages
Bullog got taken down, but Luo Yonghao still has a strong presence online and is a sought-after lecturer. He recently published his memoirs “My Struggle”/《我的奋斗》, which have sold fairly well.
Made in China. I’m surprised it lasted three years.
The guy should also beat his kids with the sledgehammer
Of course hitting on Siemens is such a safe target… the “mentally challenged” guy was perfectly right, i’ll respect this guy when he attacks someone who can actually retaliate. (and i’m sure there’s plenty, PLENTY of chinese corporations doing MUCH WORSE than Siemens at this point). But then again, he’s just a classic case. (frankly I just wasted 5 minutes of my life reading this report and commenting on it. pure waste of time across the board.)
Anytime a person goes from being a peasant to citizen and exercises their human right to protest, and free speech it’s a good thing.
I laud his point if not his methods. I suggest that he ‘smash’ them with pillows and then donate the still functional, if some what dysfunctional, appliances to a needy family. Then if Siemens fixes them [as it has promised] there has been less waste. His statement of Siemens not keeping promises is good but destroying the ‘messenger’ seems ill-considered.
Well,
I guess it’s a image campaign, maybe sponsored by another company.
Anyway: products produced in Germany have the highest standard.
But products…even german brands…produced in china are really bad.
Of course it’s cheaper to produce there, but the quality is a totally different thing.
It’s not enough to have millions of little ants, following….
You idiots realize that most goods sold in China is made in China by morons to help multinationals make money in China and help the CCP quiet dissent by offering moronic-CCP-sheep (mainland chinese citizens/netizens following what the CCP says, does, and doesn’t have the brain cells to think nor the guts to revolt) jobs
He has to learn the peaceful protest as a civilized citizen. After that Chinese can do their protest toward the CCP, make it possible for another Tiananmen protest
The bottom line is that he was so cheap to buy the extend insurance for those home appliances, most of them have 1 year guarantee from manufactures
3 years is very good life time for made in china stuffs